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Violin Memory announced today that data deduplication and compression capabilities are now available on its Concerto 2200 solution. Customers will normally experience deduplication rates between 6:1 and 10:1, according to the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said. The data reduction appliance offers up to 672 TB of usable storage at a data reduction rate of 6:1.

The company markets the Concerto 2200 appliance as an enhancement to its Violin 6000 and 7000 all-flash arrays by reducing the amount of data written to them. According to Violin Memory, the solution can reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX) by slashing hardware expenses through space savings.

Violin data reduction services for NFS environments on the Concerto 2200 solution are available now. Deduplication and compression for block storage are expected to follow in early 2015, the company said.

Inline deduplication is an increasingly common feature for flash-based storage vendors. EMC, a competitor of Violin Memory in flash storage, already offers the service on its flash arrays. “We see competitors who offer ‘always on’ deduplication and compression, but we know that, depending on the customers’ workloads, performance may suffer as a result of the ‘always on’ approach,” Herzog said.

To give users the ability to control the use of deduplication on their workloads, the application dashboard will provide information on data reduction rates and whether or not the process is benefiting the user, Violin Memory said. Clients can then decide for themselves whether to implement deduplication on their data.

The Concerto 2200 solution consists of two high availability appliances that deduplicate and compress shares, share groups or files from NFS and write the data to LUNs (logical unit numbers). The LUNs being serviced can all be on one array, or scaled across up to four arrays, depending on requirements. The solution is capable of storing 672 TB of data or enough data for 2,500 persistent desktops in a VDI deployment at a street cost of approximately $1.81/GB or $75/desktop, Violin Memory said.

Reducing Costs in a Flash

“Data reduction technologies like compression and deduplication are critical in improving the overall TCO of flash-based arrays,” according to Eric Burgener, Flash Storage Research Director at IDC. “Certain application workloads benefit much more from compression, while others benefit much more from deduplication. For maximum effectiveness, these capabilities need to be implemented inline without unduly impacting application performance and vendors need to offer both.”

Despite the growing popularity of flash storage solutions compared to traditional HDDs (hard disk drives), many CIOs are still hesitant to commit to the technology due to the significant difference in price per gigabyte between the two, said Jim Handy, Director at Objective Analysis. Violin Memory’s implementation of deduplication and compression help address that concern by lowering the CAPEX costs of its flash solutions.

The news follows Violin Memory’s announcement in June that it start providing data services software to the Concerto 7000 all-flash array, including synchronous and asynchronous replication, stretch metro cluster capabilities, storage snapshots, thin provisioning, LUN and capacity expansion, and advanced data protection and storage scaling capabilities. The company will be featuring the Concerto 2200 at VMware’s upcoming VMworld event at the end of August.